Regardless of how we define it, “marginality” offers a unique viewpoint for studying Latin American cities, which rank among the most unequal in the world. The concept gained traction in the 1960s, the flip side of a sweeping modernization process that seemingly transformed the region from “traditional” to “modern.” Within this framework, urban marginality referred to people and spaces left out of modernization. Although the term carries heavy historical baggage, the editors believe it remains useful for analyzing power relationships in the political, social, and cultural fields. Accordingly, they “reclaim” the concept, deploying it to probe the relationship between politics and culture, particularly in the present era. Locating the marginal in the city and coining a working definition across disciplines creates a degree of vagueness, but the editors posit that this vagueness is pregnant with potential for creativity by groups from both within and outside marginal spaces.

The first section of the book asks, “Where are the margins?” Lucy O'Sullivan analyzes Juan Rulfo's photographs of a landmark renewal project in 1950s Mexico City, the demolishing of the old rail yards to build the functionalist housing unit Unidad Tlatelolco. As with his writings, Rulfo's photographs hint at the blind spots of Mexico's postrevolutionary modernization project. Commissioned by the public railroad company to document the public works, Rulfo depicted an “urban community at the margins of the state's modernisation project” (33).

Cristian Silva's essay charts an analog geography—albeit at a larger scale and in the present time—composed of the abandoned industrial zones, areas of countryside, agricultural plots, and other areas in the interstices of Santiago's urban sprawl in Chile. Apparently derelict, Santiago's margins are in fact produced by planning policies and codes, for they exist in the gaps between developed and undeveloped land, zoning regimes, and city, countryside, and suburb. Although the meaning of the margin is ambiguous, the space “articulates the entire urban fabric” and transforms our understanding of Santiago's urban sprawl (79). Mitómana (2009), an unclassifiable film halfway between documentary and fiction, inspires Paul Merchant's essay, also set in Santiago. Unlike earlier documentaries that represented marginal neighborhoods as sites for identity formation and political action, Mitómana offers a more disturbing picture: the collapse of any social and political identities that map onto the built environment—a shapeless multitude that characterizes the neoliberal city.

The second section centers on politics and policy, highlighting how marginalized groups have claimed a political space in Latin American cities. Orlando Deavila Pertuz documents how self-made shantytowns were constitutive for citizenship formation in Cartagena, Colombia, between 1958 and 1972. By participating in community councils, residents managed to improve their neighborhoods as well as forge a relationship with the state, not as clients but as active citizens. Lucy McMahon covers a longer period, comparing three popular mobilizations in Brazilian labor history: the Salvador da Bahia porters’ strike of 1857 (organized by slaves and ex-slaves), Rio de Janeiro's 1904 vaccination riots, and the 2013 strike led by the teacher's union of the State of Rio de Janeiro. Throughout these political mobilizations, “marginal spaces and actors made significant creative contributions to political practice, perceptions of marginality and . . . policy” (149).

Together, Deavila Pertuz and McMahon argue that marginal communities have always played a key role in Latin American politics, integral to state formation and struggles for citizenship. Anabella Roitman analyzes the administration of Comuna 8, one of 15 jurisdictions created by the government of the city of Buenos Aires as part of a decentralization drive. Through an account of Buenos Aires's labyrinthine bureaucracy, Roitman illustrates how marginal spaces are managed and produced by overlapping jurisdictions and planning regimes. Her analysis hints at a mode of governing and planning Latin America's sprawling and decentralized cities—one that could lend itself to comparisons with other cities.

The last section addresses the representation of marginality in the arts. Simone Kalkman analyzes representations of favelas in contemporary Rio de Janeiro. Moving beyond the stigmatizing and romanticizing that often characterize favela writings, Kalkman compares favela exhibits across different socio-spatial contexts—the Museu de Arte Moderna in the upscale southern zone and the Travessias exhibition in the Galpão Bela Maré, in the Maré favela—interrogating how, and by whom, this cultural production is consumed. Finally, Niall H. D. Geraghty and Adriana Massidda read two recent films, La multitud (2012) and Dromómanos (2012), to interrogate the relationship between architecture and power in Buenos Aires. Their chapter, a good companion to Merchant's piece, reflects on the relationship between the urban fragmentation portrayed in recent Argentine (and other Latin American) films, neoliberalism, and marginality. It focuses on the marginal characters represented in the movie, their meanderings through Buenos Aires, and the creativity and productive energy unleashed by these movements. How do these movements disrupt the city's social order? What type of empowerment could these marginal characters achieve? What kind of city would such empowerment create?

This chapter strikes at the heart of the interdisciplinary nature of this volume. Making the marginal visible—through the analysis of culture and the arts—is a creative endeavor, open with political promise (although for many volume authors this is a promise small and distant). Marginality is—today, as in the 1950s—difficult to define and locate. In the 1970s, historian José Luis Romero categorized Latin America's post-World War II cities as “mass cities,” shapeless megacities transformed by rural migrants. Many essays offer a similar rendering, describing fragmented cities afflicted by a misalignment between their built environment, their social order, and their structures of political mediation and representation—neoliberalism is the most common shorthand for this misalignment. This volume cannot offer a straightforward answer to this crisis, but together its essays prompt us to explore it in its many dimensions, imaginative and concrete.